A Summer Bright and Terrible (33 page)

In 1942 Dowding retired officially from the
Royal Air Force, receiving a pension of thirteen hundred pounds yearly. The Air
Ministry refused to honour him by promotion to Marshal of the Royal Air Force,
but Churchill saw to it that he was elevated to the peerage as Lord Dowding of
Bentley Priory. He was asked to write an official report on the Battle of
Britain, which they then never published. Instead the Ministry wrote its own
history, without even mentioning his name. Churchill was infuriated by this. He
wrote to Sinclair: “The jealousies and cliquism which have led to the
committing of this offence are a discredit to the Air Ministry, and I do not think
any other Service Department would have been guilty of such a piece of work.
What would have been said if . . . the Admiralty had told the tale of Trafalgar
and left Lord Nelson out of it?”

After the war, when Churchill wrote his own
history of the struggle, he seems to have forgotten to ask himself that same
question. In his tale of the Battle of France, he ignores Dowding’s insistence
on sending no more Hurricanes across the Channel, writing only that “I decided
to ask . . . for the despatch of six more [Hurricane squadrons]

. . . and that was the final limit. If
Churchill had had his way, the valiant Few who won the Battle of Britain would
have been the futile Too Few who would have lost it. (Dowding later commented
only that “you couldn’t expect the man to admit that he nearly lost us the
Battle of Britain before it began.”)

Many years later, at the premiere of the movie
The
Battle of Britain,
Dowding—crippled by arthritis—was wheeled into the theatre,
and the audience stood up and cheered. At the following Royal Performance there
was no such reaction. The reason was that at the first showing the audience was
made up of the former pilots, his chicks; at the second, the audience was
composed of the high muckety-mucks who had gotten rid of him.

And so Dowding finally retired—to begin what he
considered the most important mission in his life.

Thirty-four

On the evening of May 21, 1944, a British
Lancaster bomber piloted by a young man named Max Whiting did not return from a
mission over Germany. His wife, Muriel, received the standard telegram telling
her that her husband was “missing in action.” The months passed by, and neither
she nor Max’s father could get any further information.

She woke early one morning to find a “tall,
thin man in grey flannel trousers and a bluish shirt . . . [with] greyish hair
and very blue eyes. I knew him at once . . . he was someone I loved dearly. . .
. I laughed with happiness and called to him, ‘Hugh’ . . .”

And then he faded away. Muriel had no idea who
this man was until several weeks later, when she spotted in a Sunday paper an
article written by Dowding, along with his picture. It seemed to be the same
man, but she “dismissed the entire incident as too fantastic for words.”

By this time Dowding had published a book,
Many
Mansions,
in which he spoke of matters spiritual. He wrote, for example,
that “the Earth is the centre of a series of hollow spheres each bigger than
the last. . . . Each of these spheres represents a state of spiritual
development a little in advance of that below.” But of more interest to Muriel
and her father-in-law was Dowding’s witness to life after death, as in the tale
of a Polish pilot who was shot down:

“Yes, I am shot down and out. I have survived
many fights, but not this one . . . I cannot control the aircraft . . . I fall
quite consciously. I get up without any pain . . . I wander about, I feel well
. . . my leg is healed. I go to the French peasants and ask for help, but they
do not see me . . . I see colours everywhere . . . I pray for help and it comes
to me. Someone looking very strange and yet quite like ourselves comes to me,
he tells me not to mind the change, it is best for all.”

Mr. Whiting urged Muriel to write to Dowding,
to ask if he could find out anything about Max’s fate, either through official
channels or by his contacts with the other world. She received “a kindly reply,”
and then several months passed with no further word. Finally another letter
came from Dowding, inviting her to come to lunch at his club, the United
Services Club in Pall Mall, and to meet his medium.

They had lunch with the medium, and after she
left, Dowding invited Muriel to stay for tea. She looked at him and, in that
moment, “I knew.” He was the man who used to appear in her dreams when she was
a little girl, calming her nightmares and promising to marry her. He was the
man with “greyish hair and very blue eyes,” who had appeared to wake her with
laughter after Max disappeared. She gasped, “Hugh!” and he smiled kindly.

Three days later he wrote again, setting up an
appointment for a seance with the medium, at which time Max’s death was “confirmed.”
Sometime later, after many meetings, old Stuffy told her he loved her dearly,
and though he was old enough to be her father, he hoped she would marry him.
And so she did.

Years later they were talking about his
reputation for communicating with the dead and how it had led many widows, or
wives of missing airmen, to write to him asking for help. Muriel asked if he
had made a practice of inviting them all to lunch, as he had her.

“Only you,” he said. “Because your husband
asked me to.”

He explained that he had written to invite her
because Max had contacted him through a medium, and had told him to ask her out
to lunch. “You will like her,” he had promised.

Secure now in a loving marriage, Dowding
set out to bring to the world the promise of goodness and fulfilment that his
knowledge of the universal truth proclaimed. “The facts which I do know, I know
with that complete certainty of personal conviction which nothing can shake.
Among these are the facts that I am in constant personal communication with my
wife and other relations and friends who have gone ahead of me into the next
stage of life.”

Even before this he had made several attempts
to spread the word. In 1943 he published a series of articles in the
Sunday
Pictorial
telling of the messages he received from the beyond, and in
October 1942 he talked openly to a gathering of the Few. It was at a dinner
party at the Savoy Hotel, given by a group of American fliers. They had invited
the veterans of the Battle of Britain, and Dowding was the guest of honour.
Although he had previously spoken of his beliefs to several of his chicks in
personal conversations, this was the first time anyone remembers hearing him
speak out in public. As one of them, Hugh Dundas, remembers, “All of us in that
room felt the greatest respect and affection for our old chief, but his totally
unexpected revelations, when he told us over the port that he was in regular
communication with many of our friends who had been killed in action and that
they were all in good shape and quite happy, had a macabre effect on the
company. I am afraid that the reaction of most of us at that time was that ‘the
old boy had gone round the bend.’ . . . The thought of our former colleagues
lurking mysteriously around us in that room at the Savoy, waiting for us to get
in touch with them, tended to charge the atmosphere and quicken our thirsts.
Thus it was a collection of fighter pilots in an advanced state of alcoholic hilarity
which was discharged at a late hour upon the night clubs of London.”

Dowding wrote books, pamphlets, and newspaper
articles, striving to bring his visions to the people. When he entered the
House of Lords, he was greeted warmly by his old antagonist, Boom Trenchard,
who had been the first—and, until Dowding made his appearance—the only RAF man
to become a peer of the realm. “We need you, Stuffy,” he said. “At last we’ve
got another voice here in the Lords to support the RAF.”

He was wrong. Dowding never spoke in defence of
the air force, never pushed a proposal for its expansion. He dropped the air
force as completely as they had dropped him, the only difference being that he
didn’t do it out of spite or for personal advantage. He had more important
issues to push, and his only connection with the RAF now was in helping dead
pilots find their way to eternity and comforting with the Truth those left
behind. His only concern now was to spread the Word. He made ardent speeches in
the House of Lords, but they were for vegetarianism or against vivisection,
explaining that all lives are holy and eternal.

He explained that death is a gradual process,
during which time the astral body leaves the etheric double, “floating near the
latter till the ‘silver cord’ (which is a very real thing) is broken . . . and
the etheric double is discarded with the physical body” while the true being
goes on to the astral world. He taught that “the most improbable thing about
fairies and gnomes is that they are so exactly like our conceptions . . .
formless little blobs of light when they are about their work of tending or nourishing
the plants; but they have little minds and the power of clothing their
thought-forms in etheric material.” He had no doubt that flying saucers were
real and extraterrestrial.

He received messages from Sir Gerald Lock, a
wealthy Guards subaltern who died a hundred years ago and who was upset because
his descendants didn’t treat the Irish as lovingly as he had done. Dowding’s
wife Muriel shared in all these beliefs and didn’t quibble when Hugh spent
loving time with his first (dead) wife.

He discovered the secret of perpetual motion
and testified to the goodness of God, though not to conventional religion. He
talked to people from Atlantis, “the home of the Fourth Root race . . . [whose]
evil caused volcanic catastrophes in 10,000 B.C. The survivors fled to Egypt
and built the pyramids.” He advocated magnetic healing rays to cure gout and
arthritis.

All to little avail. No one was interested. In
1943, he wrote plaintively to a friend that “5 publishers have now refused my
book.” Eventually, his books were published by the Psychic Press or other small
publishers, but he was preaching to the choir. He became a hero to the psychic
community, but was regarded as a nut by everyone else. With his quiet sense of humour,
he himself liked to tell the story of two Americans who heard him give a
spiritualism lecture. One of them asked his neighbour, “Is this Lord Dowding
any relation to Sir Hugh Dowding who fought the Battle of Britain?” His friend
replied, “He must be his father. In England the son of a Lord is a Sir.” The
first man added, “Gee, I wonder what a smart guy like him would think of his
old man going off the rails that way.”

He knew this was the majority opinion, but it
didn’t matter; he never wavered. Together with his living wife, Muriel, he
fought against cruelty to animals and vivisection experiments, founding with
her the charity Beauty Without Cruelty to advocate cosmetics production without
animal experiments. With his dead wife, Clarice, he comforted and guided the
dead through the astral plane to their peace.

In 1970, at the age of eighty-eight and with
all the controversies that surrounded him unresolved, he left this life to join
the spirit world he so loved and where—according to all the seances at which he
has since materialized and the mediums throughout the world who still adore
him—he continues to live happily ever after.

If England had lost the Battle of Britain,
the subsequent history of World War II and indeed the second half of the
twentieth century would have been drastically different. That battle was
directed by Hugh Dowding from before its beginning—with the development of the
RAF’s first monoplane eight-gunned fighters and radar, together with their
supporting components—through the Battle of France and his stand against
Churchill, all the way to its victorious conclusion. Yet he has received little
thanks.

Aside from one or two gracious comments, such
as acknowledging his defeat of the Scandinavian German bombers with the comment
“genius in the art of war,” Churchill in his histories largely ignored Dowding’s
contributions. One should note that these histories, although admired by much
of the world, were not admired so universally by the military professionals. A
staff member of the Imperial Defence College wrote to General Sir Hastings
Ismay: “I’ve been reading Winston’s book. Of course, he doesn’t
really
understand modern war.”

Which may have been slightly unfair since
Churchill didn’t write much of whatever he signed his name to. In particular,
his history of the battle was largely ghost-written: Ismay, writing to Air
Marshal Sir John Slessor, said: “The Battle of Britain figures in his next
volume. So far as I remember, he got the story written for him at piece rates
by an ex-airman Don, recommended to me before I left for India, but whose name
I have forgotten.”

You might reflect that since he took credit—and
the Nobel Prize—for these books, he should also take the blame for their
inaccuracies. At any rate, despite lambasting the Air Ministry for neglecting
Dowding in its official account of the battle, he himself diminished Dowding’s
contributions, particularly when acknowledging them would have necessitated
diminishing his own. And such is Churchill’s reputation that many authors who
followed him have accepted his lead.

William Manchester’s massive Churchill biography
doesn’t mention the contretemps about depleting Fighter Command by sending
Hurricanes to France. In another recent history of that battle, Ernest May’s
Strange
Victory,
Dowding’s name is not even mentioned. When the Marquess of
Londonderry wrote a history of the development of the RAF up through the Battle
of Britain
(Wings of Destiny),
he mentioned Dowding in only two
sentences. Another story,
Battles over Britain,
by Guy de la Bedoyere,
doesn’t mention Dowding at all, and barely mentions radar.

It is in the reminiscences of the fighter
pilots themselves that Dowding stands tall today. Again and again their trust,
gratitude, and—yes, even affection for old Stuffy—come through loud and clear.

Flying Officer Chris Foxley-Norris: “He was a
father figure. You felt that as long as his hand was on the tiller all was
going to be well.”

Squadron Leader Sandy Johnston: “Great names
would later arise . . . and great battles won. . . . But they were all courtesy
of Stuffy Dowding. None of those people would even have been heard of if Stuffy
hadn’t been there, if he hadn’t won the Battle of Britain.”

Squadron Leader George Darley: “Dowding was too
nice a chap and he came up against a gang of thugs. Leigh-Mallory was very
jealous of him. . . . “

Nor was it only the pilots. Elizabeth Quayle, a
WAAF Operations Room plotter at Bentley Priory, recalled: “We all admired our
Stuffy enormously. We had great loyalty to him. I think you might call it
affection. . . . “

There stand today two sculptures of Dowding in
London. One is a full statue erected in 1958 in front of the Church of St.
Clement Dane, the “official church of the Royal Air Force, in the Strand. It
was commissioned not by the British government but by private subscription of
the Battle of Britain pilots. The other sculpture is in the Belgrave Square
lobby of the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain.

When World War II came to America, my
father became an air-raid warden in Philadelphia. He would put on his white
armband and take up his flashlight and go off into the neighbourhood to make
sure no lights were slipping out of un-blacked-out windows to help guide German
bombers to their destination. I, being a smart-ass kid at the time, laughed.

“Hitler doesn’t have any aircraft carriers,” I told
him, “and there are no German bombers with enough range to cross the Atlantic,
let alone get back home again. There’s no way we can be bombed.”

He told me about the newspapers reporting
Roosevelt’s warning that German bombers could reach us from Africa, and I, with
the assurance of youth, replied that Roosevelt didn’t know what he was talking
about.

I was a snot-nosed, impertinent kid, but I was
right. Roosevelt—or the newspapers—were only trying to scare us into taking the
war seriously. There was no way Philadelphia could be bombed from the air in
1942.

But in the spring of 1941, Willy Messerschmitt
had been awarded a contract for a four-engine bomber capable of carrying four
thousand pounds of bombs over a distance of nine thousand miles; that is, the
bomber would be capable of bombing America and returning to Berlin. Its
official designation was the
Amerikabomber.

The Amerikabomber first flew a year later, but
failed to achieve its specified range and airspeed. Design work continued. On
May 16, 1942, Hermann Goring called a conference at Luftwaffe headquarters to
plan a new series of aircraft capable of bombing American cities, with New York
as the primary target. These included jet bombers and flying wing designs, far
in advance of anything the United States had.

In the spring of 1944, American and British
bombers, flying from bases in England, destroyed the Amerikabomber prototypes
and the factory set up for its production. The more advanced designs by the
firms of Focke-Wulf, Fokker, and Horten were similarly wrecked by the Allied
bombing.

Without Britain as a base, there would have
been no such bombing of Germany, and the Amerikabombers would have been in full
production. Without the bombing of Germany from bases in England, the full
strength of the Luftwaffe would have been available for the Eastern Front, and
Russia would have been defeated. (When asked by Russian captors after the war
which was the turning point, Stalingrad or Moscow, General von Rundstedt shook
his head. “The Battle of Britain,” he replied.)

If the Luftwaffe had prevailed over England, by
1945 the Amerikabombers would have been flying across the Atlantic, competing
with Werner von Braun’s V-10 rocket in the destruction of American cities.

So, thank you, Stuffy. Wherever you are.

* *
*

If he had been only the man who pushed
through the development of the eight-gun monoplane fighters that won the battle
. . . If he had been only the first military man to understand the promise of
radar, and who had the faith to base his defence on it . . . If he had been
only the man who fought to implement the supporting facilities—the Ops Rooms,
Controllers, WAAFs, and complex underground telephone system—that made it
possible for radar to work . . . If he had been, finally, only the man who understood
what was at stake in the battle—as his adversary, Hermann Goring, did not—and
who thus set in place the strategy that won . . .

If he had been any one of these men he would
take his place among the heroes of the Second World War. But he did it all.

* *
*

The peace and happiness of thousands of
millions unborn, through countless generations to come, depended directly on
his decisions.

—C. S.
Forester

* * *

To him, the people of Britain and of the
free world owe largely the way of life and the liberties they enjoy today.

—Inscription
on Dowding’s tomb in Westminster Abbey

* * *